Benchmark for Research Theme Classification of Scholarly Documents

We present a new gold-standard dataset and a benchmark for the Research Theme Identification task, a sub-task of the Scholarly Knowledge Graph Generation shared task, at the 3rd Workshop on Scholarly Document Processing. The objective of the shared task was to label given research papers with research themes from a total of 36 themes. The benchmark was compiled using data drawn from the largest overall assessment of university research output ever undertaken globally (the Research Excellence Framework - 2014). We provide a performance comparison of a transformer-based ensemble, which obtains multiple predictions for a research paper, given its multiple textual fields (e.g. title, abstract, reference), with traditional machine learning models. The ensemble involves enriching the initial data with additional information from open-access digital libraries and Argumentative Zoning techniques (Teufel et al., 1999b). It uses a weighted sum aggregation for the multiple predictions to obtain a final single prediction for the given research paper. Both data and the ensemble are publicly available on https://www.kaggle.com/ and https://github.com/ProjectDoSSIER/sdp2022, respectively.